Sixty-eight years and 33 albums in and Bob Dylan seems bigger than ever. When this 3,000-capacity show went on sale, there were more than 100,000 attempts to buy tickets in an hour, crashing the Roundhouse website.

Those who succeeded were happy to queue around the block waiting for the doors to open, although celebrity fans Jude Law, Clive Owen and Bill Nighy presumably didn’t join us in line.

This was a special, relatively intimate event ahead of today’s release of Dylan’s decent new album Together Through Life. But the impressive demand — he also played the O2 Arena on Saturday — really has little to do with his 33rd record, and he didn’t bother to play a single note from it.

However, if the audience were expecting this dapper gentleman in a dark jacket and wide-brimmed white hat to recreate his Sixties legacy in exchange for £75, they should have known better. Dylan’s reputation for frustrating live experiences precedes him, and this was no exception: he stood behind a keyboard for two hours, his voice rattling and rasping through recent songs as well as several classics, which were often rendered unrecognisable by their altered tempos.

His blues-rock band were undeniably brilliant. And, once the performance settled down during a pleasingly ragged Tangled Up In Blue, the wrecked vocal actually provided a welcome and surprisingly malleable counterpoint to the sharp guitar licks and expert rhythms.

Despite Dylan’s reluctance to faithfully reproduce his famous songs or actually communicate with the audience, the atmosphere was generally devotional. Even the man who shouted “cantankerous old bastard” expressed it with a certain amount of respect.

On a stark stage, Dylan and his musicians blasted through 2001’s Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum, but few of his other 21st century compositions could compete with its killer riff.

Dylan offered the occasional keyboard and harmonica solo, but ultimately it was his imperfect yet distinctive vocal that kept you enthralled, especially on a mumbling finale of Like A Rolling Stone. He briefly turned to the crowd to accept their applause, then returned for an encore that included All Along The Watchtower, the lovely, lilting Spirit On The Water from 2006 and a resolute Blowin’ In The Wind. There was only a glimpse of the original Sixties protest singer, but it was enough. He may be difficult and frustrating, but Bob Dylan remains a uniquely compelling artist.